Will TYPO3 Neos be competitive from day one?

On the TYPO3 Neos team, we often get the question – when will Neos be capable of doing the same as TYPO3 CMS? In other words: Will Neos be competitive from day one? This article aims to answer the question but it also targets another, potentially far more important question to the TYPO3 community surrounding the Neos project.

Different demands – one product

TYPO3 Neos must be highly usable by clients with extremely different needs. It’s not until you really dig into the details that you discover what kind of challenges this fact gives the CMS. Everyone in our community who has been involved in the details of building TYPO3 CMS knows this intimately. I personally think we are doing a really good job in TYPO3 CMS on so many points. But outsiders often focus, quite naturally, on the type of website or other digital form of publication they work on themselves. It often leads to thinking that their demands are probably similar to the everyone's needs. One of the main reasons why every CMS-building community or vendor takes its time introducing radically new technology is that client demands are much more different than most people not involved in the details tend to think.

A university needs a very different set of features than a marketing-driven enterprise – and likewise, a media organization have other demands than the small, tech-savvy internet startup. The examples are many and if you dive into the specific requirements, you will quickly discover just how great some of the differences are – of both technical and editorial nature.

Just think of the university opposed to a camera producing company. The university needs a lot of their content to be stored and distributable – not just for a couple of years – but essentially for centuries. They have to plan for that. On the other hand, the camera company need quick campaign sites with good language support – yet, on the websites they control themselves, their content typically doesn’t need to last too long. In many cases, they might even want to make sure their old content is not available.

The need for a new mindset

The feature-set in TYPO3 CMS is so great that the CMS can be bend to meet virtually any need. Neos naturally doesn’t pack that multitude of tools from the beginning but if you think about it just a bit more you discover that this fact can actually be a good thing – especially for the main group of projects where TYPO3 has always been strong; the technically challenging, complex assignments.

Being worried about the lack of features in its first coming versions is a fundamentally wrong mindset to approach the new product with. Neos will, in every possible way, be planned with a framework mindset. Even the UX/UI part is planned and designed to be a framework. From all parts of the Neos core development, we keep it as generic as possible.

we're laying out a software landscape that's eagerly waiting to be filled out by its new inhabitants – with great content, wonderful extensions, social features and powerful editor-directed analytics to help them serve their own end-goals

Neos is designed to be a software space that allows anything to flow through it – and be integrated in any direction. The interface aims to give developers highly structured pointers to where to put different types of modules, fields, editing capabilities, analytics, social features and so on. But we strive to restrain ourselves from making too many "spikes" in the interfaces coming from the core. Instead, we're laying out a software landscape that's eagerly waiting to be filled out by its new inhabitants – with great content, wonderful extensions, social features and powerful editor-directed analytics to help them serve their own end-goals.

The extensions can be produced on modular basis where an agency, a freelancer or a client produces whatever they need. But what’s probably more interesting is the idea of editions or some level of distributions of TYPO3 Neos.

From the core side, we’re doing everything to make sure that it will become accessible to produce editions of Neos. On top of the core, a marketing edition could be constructed with all the modules, plugins and configurations that make it insanely awesome for that particular segment. Those editions could be led by distinct product visions. Likewise, editions could be put together for education, media, government and so on.

Whoever wants to grow their business (or whoever merely wants to develop creative and mind-blowing extensions) can come together to make such editions. If you want to use Neos to compete with Adobe Web Experience Manager – feel very free to start planning how to construct the edition on top of the Neos core that will do so. Likewise for any other kind of segmented, targeted or process-focused business goal that needs very specialized CMS capabilities.

All this means that TYPO3 Neos in its core form should be pretty lightweight. Larger features that are only used by one type of organization should not drag down the product experience to those who’ll never user that feature. Why should they be troubled by our features when they don’t need them? It is far smarter to make a smaller CMS core built on a strong application framework – and make it highly extensible.

That’s why I also personally think it doesn’t make much sense to come up with one global strategy for what Neos should or shouldn’t offer all of its client segments. It would have made perfect sense if we had chosen to target Neos to a particular segment or type of organization or process. That’s just not the strategy.

If anything, the global product vision, as I personally see it, is to produce a content management framework for advanced digital publishing with really strong usability in the core features of content authoring and management. I think, to an increasing extent it is wiser to think of the CMS as not just one single product or piece of software – but as a system (often made up of different products put together) that combined can deliver very different things for increasingly different scenarios.

The answer to the first question

Will TYPO3 Neos be competitive from day one? The answer is yes – as a lightweight CMS-layer on top of a strong application framework that you can extend based on your needs.

Language support will not make it into 1.0 and that will obviously hinder it from being used in many projects. But in that time from 1.0 to 1.1 (where you’ll get your languages), agencies, freelancers and clients can get to know the new product and learn its new possibilites and embedded technologies. Meanwhile, from the core team, we will dig into designing and implementing a both advanced and easy-to-use type of multi-language functionality and make sure that becomes a state-of-the-art piece of Neos. Most of the implementation of multi-language support is naturally already planned and we've made sure that Neos is entirely ready to handle that extremely well – we just don't want to postpone the 1.0 release further but rather make the product available for everyone to begin making friends with it.

Also, right now, some really interesting international clients are selecting Neos for their projects. They only do that because it is already highly competitive.

It may sound weird to some – but today it is not that uncommon for clients to build their own custom-CMS on top of application frameworks. One of the arguments for doing that is that enterprise-class CMSes have become too big and heavy. TYPO3 Neos is positioning itself right in the middle to make sure you don’t have to choose one extreme or the other.

You don’t need to either choose an application framework and do the CMS yourself – or a huge enterprise CMS that will need a lot of work to scale it down and make it easy to use for editors. You can choose an application framework that comes with a thinner CMS layer that fits right in.

The far greater question

On a lot of points, we start over with TYPO3 Neos. A lot of key extensions have to be built pretty much from scratch. And that makes me ask the question I think is the most essential for the future use of Neos:

How do we make everyone – who program and design extensions for Neos – make a better job at sharing them than we have done in the past in TYPO3?

How do we create an open source culture around Neos where agencies, freelancers and clients don’t hold on to their extensions because it’s too much trouble to share them?

I know of so many remarkable extensions made for TYPO3 CMS that are not shared – not because clients didn’t want to share them – but because it’s been way too hard and time-consuming to do it.

That’s the question we should focus on now – to make Neos become an open source platform that not only has a strong core and a modern framework but also a broad range of extensions of the highest quality.

TYPO3 CMS

Having worked with TYPO3 CMS for many years now, I have a lot of love for that piece of software. There are even small parts here and there that originated from myself. I have taught many editors how to use it well and helped plan projects that spun into thousands of websites running on TYPO3 CMS. Although being focused on Neos, I still strongly advocate for using TYPO3 CMS. It is so much better than so many of its competitors and should continue to be so.

The original path that was roadmapped made TYPO3 Neos the successor of TYPO3 CMS. Over the last couple of months, I've kept asking myself if that is really still such a good idea.

If you look into the Berlin Manifesto – that goes back all the way to 2008 (!), it states that migration of content must be easily possible. I couldn't agree more on that point. However, most of the other points I cannot easily subscribe to today.

I would personally prefer to let TYPO3 7.0 – and beyond – loose of the thinking that Neos is still a succesor to it. I know there are people who disagree strongly – so I encourage the entire community to debate this. In 2008, the writers of the manifesto naturally could not know what would end up happening in 2013. Even less, the group of people who did the roadmap introducing Phoenix/5.0.

We must continue to make it really easy for our clients to understand our product strategy – and to switch from one product to the other if they want or if their agency suggests they do. Yet, at the same time I believe we also have to channel as much innovation into TYPO3 CMS as we are able to do in TYPO3 Neos because we don't need to think about a vast existing user base. In a world of such extreme differences of client demands, I could easily envision a future of 2 parallely driven CMSes that respond differently to those different needs. TYPO3 CMS has this great advantage right now that it has so many existing users. From a user experience, information architecture or content strategy point of view – that is a tremendous thing to have – to test new ideas in real-life scenarios with real content on real websites.

Should we make it as easy as possible to switch between the products? Absolutely. I would just love to see energy, innovation and commitment be freed up everywhere in our ecosystem. We need to debate how to do that and not be bold about the future of the entire TYPO3 community embracing all 3 major products.

Maybe a model like github can be inspiring, with a really easy way to fork an extension and adapt it to your own needs, but keeping the code public.

Composer can be a great help to deal with this forking ecosystem. And has the main owner of the extension can have access to the fork graph, he can decide if some feature need to be included in the "official extension".

An other point with this github, or bitbucket or whatever, based solution, is that the TYPO3 community must not handle the git infrastructure, by using open and widely used solution. The TYPO3 Community must just maintain a sort or TER/Packagist repository that can offer a central vision of the Flow/Neos ecosystem.

Currently it's not easy to have a GIT repository at git.typo3.org and forge doesn't support forking, pull request in an easy way has github / bitbucket offer.

Many widely used project switch to github, like jQuery, ... so maybe it's time to know if the TYPO3 community must own this kind of infrastructure (with less features, or bad learning curve), or work more with widely used solution.

I think that a dynamic extension ecosystem need this kind of forking features, I don't know how many time I just adapt a TER extension for a specific need, but forget to push the patch upstream (for some many different reasons ...).

Marc Neuhaus26-09-13 10:47

Regarding the attraction of the extension ecosystem we might have to learn a bit from the Wordpress ecosystem. Currently basically every extension for TYPO3 is completely free, with very few exceptions. In the Wordpress world there is a growing trend towards "Premium" Plugins which may cost a bit money, but this quote from (http://yoast.com/selling-wordp... summarises it pretty good in my opinion:

"Making money directly == more time to invest in development"

To be clear, i'm not talking about putting a huge price tag on everything, if there's one thing that the App-Stores have told us, is that people are willing to put out fair amounts of cash for a good + supported/updated for product.

// Start Crazy Talk
What if we'd make it possible to easily buy packages/extensions through TER/Package Management? TYPO3 was kind of pioneer with it's TER back in the days. Going one step further and fostering a living ecosystem could bring good new life into that whole eco-system.
// End Crazy Talk

Dave27-09-13 17:50

"Will TYPO3 Neos be competitive from day one? The answer is yes "

IMHO this sounds like an incredibly over optimistic answer, my answer would be a realistic "no" because the effort required to get up to speed to add the "missing" functionality to Neos, whatever your "missing" needs are, is not comparable to an established CMS where more than likely your needs can be satisfied from a plethora of pre-existing options and solutions.

The pressure to develop in a timely manner is something that all projects, whether university, business, or non-profit share. I believe Neos can only be compared to be competitive when it can also realise any project in a comparatively timely manner.

To me the metric for comparison should be based on time not usage or needs.

I know the vision of this article is grand, but it seems more like a self-convincing argument of a hard sell.

Let us not be delusional, the uptake to Neos will be slow in the beginning as it will have to prove its worth. It will initially not be competitive until it blooms.

Dave27-09-13 18:55

Sorry I just need to follow my comment with a twist on a appropiate Star Wars dialog. Enjoy. :-)

----
Admiral Motti: Any attack made by the "Other CMS's" against this "Neos CMS" would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they have obtained. This "Neos CMS" is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it!

Darth Vader: Don't be too proud of this technological "CMS" you've constructed. The ability to "create" a "CMS" is insignificant next to the power of the "masses to use it".
--
Original Quote -> http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000030/quotes

Rasmus Skjoldan28-09-13 00:12

Hi Dave! (whoever you are)

Still laughing upon reading your comments. Thanks a lot for your perspective here!

Although I would love to debate this from the philosopical/sci-fi angle, I have to restrain myself a bit: Because what would we gain from that?

We should not just judge Neos by its ability to create the same kinds of planets that all other CMSes can produce in whatever time frame but truly realize that here comes a tool that can foster new worlds or old ones in quite new ways.

As written: Use the time from 1.0 to 1.1 to get to know the (very) new and (very) different system. Although I'm enthusiastic about very early client adoption of Neos, I also don't expect Neos to be larger than life from day 2. It will take time. The mindset of comparison is just problematic from my point of view if you see this as a tool that directly compares to its usual competitors – by features or infrastructure to produce the same (ish) in the same amount of time.

Mass usage can be fostered in many, mostly uncontrollable ways. Yet, the most important of all being sheer enthusiasm about new possibilities.

(PS: Did you actually just turn me into a hippie version of Darth Vader?)

Andreas Becker (Andi)28-09-13 11:58

Well who will be the competitors? What market will it target? To be honest Rasmus - you and your team did a great work but you are living on a cloud of dreams. It is nice to have visions, I like them myself but simply read my comments on the mailinglist I wrote already when the start of the development of TYPO3 5 has been announced as the great big WOW! years ago.

Concerning ECO System simply take an example at the DRUPAL ECO System as here the people the TYPO3 slogan: "Inspire to share" becomes alive.

On the German mailinglist we just learned that TYPO3 seems to focus on the 1000 MegaPages available in the Web Universum with 10 Thousands of pages and Content Elements etc pp.

To be honest, have a look to the competitors of TYPO3 first and check out their spects. Soon you will realize that the competition seems to be already won! --- by others!

i.e. Drupal 8 will have a mobile responsible backend
It will have lots of features which you formerly had in the old TYPO3 and which made it so strong for many years.
it will have lots and lots of available Templates and already now over 680 Distributions for nearly all purposes.

"Neos is designed to be a software space that allows anything to flow through it – and be integrated in any direction"

This is what Drupal was from day one and now Drupal is getting the good things from TYPO3 probably because so many great former TYPO3 Agencies and Developers already joined the Drupal Development. It is a pity that so many already moved!

"Language support will not make it into 1.0 and that will obviously hinder it from being used in many projects."

While Language Support will be integrated in Drupal 8!!! it is missing in the successor in TYPO3 - a real step backwards!

"It may sound weird to some – but today it is not that uncommon for clients to build their own custom-CMS on top of application frameworks."

This is and was exactly the driving power of Drupal for years as Drupal was not really a CMS but a Framework to build a CMS and now while TYPO3 is getting back to where Drupal started years ago, Drupal is getting there where actually should have continued in being a CMS.

In other word there are people who have learned out of their businesses and some seem to like history and "left behind"

TYPO3 won't be competitive anymore like it was with 3.6.1. and even still with Versions before the King Kaspar said Bye Bye!. TYPO3 is history but we still like it! ;-) like an old and rusty car!

Best example. Post me some NEOS or TYPO3 Distributions which look nice and compare it with a DRUPAL Distribution in Functionality, Look, Flexibility, Reusability, and of course in Love.

As NEOS until now has no real Distribution but TYPO3has one simply compare the Government Package of TYPO3 with the Government Package of Drupal. I guess than you see the first impression of people and you will know the answer of the question will TYPO3 still be competitive in Future - NOT only the question if NEOS will ever be competitive.

It is sad but check back this post in 2-3 years and you will see that it is exactly like this when you will read it again!

check out all Distributions which are FREE available for Srupal and you will realize that 90% of them are even mobile friendly and responsive, have lots of Themes which fits them, have integrated realtext editors which will be Frontend inline editors in Drupal 8!!! which makes the benefit of the TYPO3 page tree more or less obsolete, which have the great taxonomy concept - which is simply missing in TYPO3 and don't forget the big big plus of Drupal: You can connect it to the world of Social Media very very easily, because most companies which provide great services in this area use Drupal their own. i.e. Kaltura, OpenX, .... and it is very difficult to find something comparable in TYPO3!

Like said already it is sad but IMHO TYPO3 has lost the race already! Especially for those very big sites they focus on now!

Andreas Becker (Andi)28-09-13 12:33

@Marc Neuhaus, wake up!
On drupal.org you will find over 680 instantly working distributions for all kind of purposes and ALL of them are FREE (like free beer!) and FREE (like in free speech).

TYPO3 Agencies should start publishing their site concepts as distributions available for everybody for free as this is what is selling Drupal and what is actually advertising their companies too. Phase2 i.e. posted just that they now maintain 4 of the most used distributions of Drupal. As a customer with enough money and a bigger project I would like to hear for sure more about them as if so many other agencies are using their Package as BASE for their Drupal sites, than this BASE must be really good and so the company building it must be good too and really understand the customer needs.

I guess so many TYPO3 premium agencies DON'T publish their sites as distributions as customers would probably very fast realize that they are only premium in their prices!

Check out some TYPO3 sites on http://t3blog.com and check those site in terms of security, check the change logs of the sites, the versions they are still using of Core and extensions and very very fast you will realize that most of them are simply complete insecure!

There are of course some who are really great AND they contribute complete sites more or less in form of extensions.

One even calls themselves the most expensive TYPO3 Agencies and they are absolute right if you measure the hourly price! And they are great! And you can recommend them! and you will soon realize that they are actually much much cheaper as others which have high prices. Exactly this company is posting the browser, organizer, quick shop and many other great extensions enable you to setup a TYPO3 like a Drupal distribution in more or less no time - Thanks Dirk I really love it!

Some smaller ones focus on the Mass market and they are very successful doing actually what you mentioned above. They have a free to use with conditions which bring them good money. I am sure those YAML Packages get sold very good because they are like those Drupal distributions - installed and ready to be filled with content in minutes.

Take an example on those within the TYPO3 area and bring this spirit to typo3.org. Start building up a TYPO3 Themes and distribution space where agencies contribute their works and where they are happy, that other agencies all around the world will be using their base distributions to start their own projects.

To make TYPO3 popular again like it was in parts of Europe until 2008 where Drupal actually was far left behind, same WordPress, you need to start living the TYPO3 slogan "Inspire to share" with all what you have and can provide.

So, Rasmus, Neos will be competitive from day one - that is, if you yourself get to define which parameters it should be competitive on, and if you don't count missing language support as a hindrance to competitiveness of the CMS, if you assume that any missing features "will just be contributed and voila, competitive!" - and if you don't care that it will actually be competing on features with is its predecessor; you know, the CMS that paid all the bills for Neos to be more than a developer's wet dream...

Forgive me for asking, but are you ever so slightly, completely delusional? I honestly cannot tell if it is some sort of delusion, if it is commonplace self-contradiction or just some esoteric redefinition of the term "competitive". You know, I consciously try to avoid all these Neos-zealot posts because they are saturated with this same sort of reality distortion field. If I didn't know better, I would have guessed "politician" rather than "UX specialist" because that right there my friend, is grade A bullshit.

I say this because it was definitely not good sense and fair judgment which made you answer "yes" to "is Neos competitive from day one?" and then you yourself immediately go on to explain all of the many, many things that Neos still doesn't have and will need to receive in order to solve the user's problems - which to a sane person whose vocabulary has not been replaced by the marketing department, means Neos cannot in any meaningful sense of the word "compete" on any of these parameters.

We Vikings are result oriented, Rasmus. Which leads me to believe you've forgotten the most important part of your Viking heritage - to prove your worth you must act, not speak. You should hold your tongue, produce results and allow those results to be objectively judged if they are competitive. This is what matters - not your subjective (distorted) verdict on some theoretical, narrow-parameters idea of "competitiveness".

Just my two cents. Your enthusiasm is, to me, noise which prevents us all from seeing the actual worth of your results.

Ric van Westhreenen30-09-13 14:50

The great thing of our community is that we have choices. If someone believes in the future of Neos, they are going to make it into a success.

If someone does not believe in the future of Neos, they'll keep on using TYPO3 CMS.

It's thriving on the well known product, or investing in a new product.

However, anyone claiming that Drupal is the better product, oh my... why should a content editor want a mobile responsive backend? To edit large pieces of content on his smartphone? And the concept of distributions? Yeah, well, that's because out-of-the-box, Drupal doesn't have a RTE. So instead of having a great product out-of-the-box like with TYPO3, you'll need Drupal with 30 plugins build by who knows what kind of developers, to get a system that is equal to a basic TYPO3 version.

I like some of their concepts from far away. But, let's keep it as concepts, and maybe incorporate one of their concepts in a different way into TYPO3 (Neos or CMS, I don't care).

As TYPO3 Community, we have a choice. We are blessed to have that. We can either choose for TYPO3 CMS, or at whatever timeframe choose to do projects with TYPO3 Neos.

Dave30-09-13 19:27

@Rasmus - No I was comparing you with Admiral Motti (confident with his new construction) not Darth Vader. I wasn't alluding to anybody being a hippy. Not quite sure how you concluded to that idea.

Neos will not be production ready until it can be proven in production. That is a chicken and egg problem that it will need to overcome. It will take time.

I also hope Neos CMS is not given a v1.0.0 too hastily.
In my mind (and others:http://semver.org/) it is at that point your API should be set to stone. Any changes to the API after v1.0.0 should be then backwards supported. I hope for minimal future API changes as it will mean minimal application bloat. Version changes in the CMS should *not* break existing installations only enhance them.

The Typo3 CMS has a horrendous record of breaking existing installations on upgrade. My hope is that Neos will break this cycle of Typo3 breaking itself. @see Typo3 LTS v4 to v6

To do that requires a psychological culture change within Typo3 community as much as adhering to some strict coding principles and thinking extremely hard about the API you are intending to deliver.

I hope that Neos is *not* competitive from day one. I would prefer a thoroughly robust and stable application that does not renegotiate on what it intends to achieve.

So:
Don't proclaim it is complete until it is.
Don't say that it is competitive when it isnt.
Don't rush it. It will only hurt the project.

I really want to label Typo3 as an "enterprise cms" as proclaimed on the T3 website. In my mind it needs to pick up its game to deserve that "enterprise" label. It has been failing in stability for the enterprise for a number of years now.

I also know that many within the T3 project have embraced a SCRUM methodology for software development. In my mind, SCRUM is very bad at producing stable API's but very good at creating patchwork quilts for putting out fires. In the Typo3 CMS, SCRUM has worked quite well to reduce the "spaghetti code" at the cost of reinventing the API and creating compatibility issues between versions.

So I think the danger of Neos being only "half-baked" is very high at this moment in time.

Don't get me wrong, I actually want the Neos CMS to succeed the Typo3 CMS for the enterprise.

However I think having "multiple" CMS's gives the wrong signal to enterprises. Enterprise wants stability and less risk. They don't want to back the wrong horse. At the moment having a choice of CMS's is a confusing signal to enterprise that they have to choose a horse. They don't want to make such choices. They just want to make the right choice.

For that reason I think Neos should "simmer" in the background until its "cooked".

Rasmus Skjoldan03-10-13 11:58

Hi guys

Thanks a lot for sharing all your thoughts! It makes me really glad that people engage in the discussion.

It's a bit difficult for us on the Neos team to manage to share, explain and communicate all (or just the important parts) of everything that's happening in Neos development at the moment. This week, we've been some 25 people working on it day and night at the code sprint in Frankfurt. That means that an enormous amount of work and progress is happening – right alongside the more long-term aspects.

Also, it is not known to everyone that Neos is both being used on real production sites – and that larger Neos implementations are being worked on – right now. So, the product is not simmering, half-baked, half-cooked, a UX'er slash politician's dream or a crazy vision. It's just... In use.

And because it is now being utilized on real, advanced projects for real clients it is also already being competitive. We have even seen multi-language support being applied on a real project.

Think about this for a moment:

Neos has already won projects over other CMSes.

So my claim that it is competitive from day 1 should even go further. It has already been competitive before day 1.

At the sprint, yesterday, I saw Neos in action on work-in-progress development – on actual projects. It was a real thrill to see that all our plans and ideas are coming together and are really just working as they should. Many things need to be improved and developed but my own personal take here is that we're fast approaching a very nice beta state.

From the UX side, our UI framework thinking is now enabling developers to very easily develop and integrate new functionality because there is a natural place to put everything. The UX planning that goes into making that happen is not something that our community is that familiar with. It is just quite another type of development than code.

I know that some of my writing may seem over-the-top to some in our community – but I think you might be overlooking the fact that the target group of our communication efforts is quite varied. It's not written solely for developers – but also for clients, agency partners, content strategists, marketing technologists, industry analysts, information architects, UX'ers, potential new-comers to the community and many many more. I get feedback from many and very different sides. When I sound overly positive to some, it is approached quite differently by others.

Also, some of the points mentioned in the comments here seem to me to be coming from a very different perspective – which naturally will make us misunderstand each other easily. That's okay – some of us will just find each other at conferences and talk in real life. Or fight it out with great viking hammers :-)

I care a lot for TYPO3. Not just Neos, Flow or CMS – but the entire project and our combined community. And I think TYPO3 Neos is going to be an insanely fabulous open source CMS! If that's crazy-talk to you, then okay. But I will keep standing up proudly for the product because I think it's on such a great path now.

Let's not be afraid of anything – neither Drupal or Adobe – or time, effort or money spent – and now just look at this amazing thing that we have created together! To those who have been concerned with money that was spent – look now at the results and the opportunities you have!

At DE-CIX, I learned yesterday that they use TYPO3 Flow as their administration application – at the worlds largest internet exchange point.

Try for a moment to grasp the perspective and the success for TYPO3 in that.

One final note for now – I absolutely love your call for viking standards, Claus. I think that might just follow me for quite some time. I will do my best to live up to the heritage.

Rasmus Skjoldan03-10-13 12:00

Oh, someone mentioned that I need to look into competitors specs – let me assure you that I am already doing that and have been for a long time now – I know them quite well, actually. I think it is really important to be acutely aware of other systems and their approaches to content management. Mainly to learn from all the cool thinking that goes on everywhere. The CMS sphere is one giant creative field at the moment.

t3agent Christian Händel04-10-13 08:22

so now its time to step into this discussion...

Rasmus here is my clear personal statement to you. It is only my opinion but i think with a big background behind.

Be realistic in your communication. I hope i'm right if i'm saying your goal is to create a big brand called NEOS as an innovative system with an "you-can-everything-do"-framework behind. But the biggest mistake you can do is creating an imagination of an product with an enormous difference to the real product. If you will disappoint early adopters and in the next step the first agencies your chance to reach the whole market will disappear every day more and more.

For example:
The typical case study why customer uses TYPO3 is they need a system that supports multiple languages, a detailed user management system and a integration way and structure that can be easily transfered to another agencies.
So and now go on and be realistic with the anser to your question: "Will TYPO3 Neos be competitive from day one?"

My answer is a full NO...

Dave04-10-13 10:55

My experience is that the duality of the Typo3 projects is causing issues within enterprises for them to look for/consider other solutions. I think a serious strategy rethink should be made at Typo3 concerning the promotion of multiple CMS's. It makes Typo3 look splintered.

I also foresee more "back-porting" (read: API breakage) from NEOS to the current TYPO3 CMS. That is leaving Typo3 with 2 problematic products.

Unless the strategy changes, from a business commitment point of view, Typo3 is not looking like a good choice, more of a risky bet at this moment in time.

For an "Enterprise CMS" that is not a good thing.

Rasmus Skjoldan06-10-13 12:05

I think it would also be really nice to discuss the question about an improved culture of sharing extensions.

Not too many have engaged in this – to me it's the single most important issue for Neos – actually far greater than the timing of its competitiveness...

What do you think – how do we improve on that part?

Hrishikesh Lele06-10-13 13:45

We have been using TYPO3 Neos for real projects since more than an year now. In most cases Neos was used as content framework along with TYPO3 Flow. Every project we had needed a CMS so this was a best choice. Currently we are working on a dozen small and big projects using Neos and our life has become easier considering efforts needed doing same work with TYPO3 CMS or Zend Framework. We left behind Drupal and Joomla 4 years ago.

So with this background I see TYPO3 Neos is already competitive and "yes" it will be competitive. Only thing is people do not know about it yet and/or know only half story.

I can mention following things about Neos which occur first in mind when we think about Neos
#1 For user, Neos means "Go and edit your website as you see it". I have seen surprise in the eyes of customers when I shown them Neos.

#2 For developers, its easy as creating a new plugin is in most of the cases is creating a new node type with almost no PHP code. Obviously more advanced extensions will need backend modules and its not difficult doing it. Learning curve is much less than TYPO3 CMS

#3 It is a solid framework for any kind of application. It gives you page tree, plugin architecture, template rendering and a backend. You can develop your custom functionality to any extend with TYPO3 Flow and integrate them as plugins. I know there is a large shop system being developed.

I asked few days back about which are the top 10 extensions we need to start using Neos for real projects http://bit.ly/16gwOcm. This questions is about how to make Neos market ready with all features available in the offering. The goal should be to discuss this point further and developers, agencies and companies should participate to make this happen quicker.

There is no platform to have such discussion only focused on TYPO3 Neos plugins and extensions. There are Neos packages floating around but nobody knows about them yet. We need a simple TER for Neos!

Considering comparing Neos with Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, I would say they cannot be compared with Neos at all as Neos is VERY different in all respect.

So I am looking forward for Neos to come to life with market ready features.

And remember very different products like iPhone have taken down once emperors of mobile Nokia and Blackberry!

Thanks
Hrishi

Rasmus Skjoldan07-10-13 10:21

Hi all

Really great to hear your story and take on this, Hrishikesh! About the simple TER, I'm not sure what the current plans are but we obviously need one. Maybe someone else from the team could answer that?

Thinking a bit more about this discussion in general, I see now that my concern is actually quite the opposite to what's stated by others.

The only professional concern I have about Neos is if the product is underappreciated because we fail to communicate it in a powerful way.

My concern is *not* that we go into some kind of unrealistic overdrive communicating a dream or a half-finished product – but quite the opposite; that we fail to recognise the greatness of it and keep communicating it to subtly.

Marc Neuhaus07-10-13 11:22

about the TER, i did some work a while ago to scrape Flow/Neos Packages from packagist.com and show them in a simple grid:

IIRC we wanted to evaluate what is still missing and then put it up on neos.typo3.org at some point.

Ben van 't Ende07-10-13 14:41

Hey Tim / Marc,

Great to hear there is progress on that front. Just for my info and excuse my ignorance on the topic. Where would all the Neos packages live? On packagist? I am not totally getting it. Would it be an idea to create a WIKI page on wiki.typo3.org for that? Just to give some human-readable info.

To have something integrated on neos.typo3.org would mean a lot for the project.

Marc Neuhaus07-10-13 14:59

Hey Ben,

packagist is a registry of composer packages. Anyone can register a package at packagist and make it available through "composer install my/package..."

The Problem is, that it is a registry of any PHP package. The Package Me + Tim worked on basically fetches any available package from the packagist registry and filteres out any non TYPO3 related packages.

Heyla, it would be a good thing if the package and plugin concept would get more attention anyway. Currently there is none, right? Kay had this example of hooking into the node, which I thought was just awesome. ......and.... this is the way to contribute to the Neos project without contributing to core. Wasn't Georg going to port his news extension to Neos? I have always understood this should be relatively simple because it is extbased.

Dave11-10-13 11:01

ZOMG, this is the most confusing thread. The article proclaims proudly how wonderfully competitive Neos will be, but then asks a bigger question about how are we going to proceed with some problem we have with extending Neos because we don't really have a method for doing that at this moment, and the thread goes into suggesting ideas on how do we do this. Well you better sort that out or else Neos CMS is going nowhere. Competitive Sheesh! Talk about counting chickens before they hatch, I am blown away by the naivety. Wake me up when it is over.